Mongst the many young men in England who are seeking along with me to
continue and to perfect the English Renaissance--_jeunes guerriers du
drapeau romantique_, as Gautier would have called us--there is none
whose love of art is more flawless and fervent, whose artistic sense of
beauty is more subtle and more delicate--none, indeed, who is dearer to
myself--than the young poet whose verses I have brought with me to
America; verses full of sweet sadness, and yet full of joy; for the most
joyous poet is not he who sows the desolate highways of this world with
the barren seed of laughter, but he who makes his sorrow most musical,
this indeed being the meaning of joy in art--that incommunicable element
of artistic delight which, in poetry, for instance, comes from what
Keats called the "sensuous life of verse," the element of song in the
singing, made so pleasurable to us by that wonder of motion which often
has its origin in mere musical impulse, and in painting is to be sought
for, from the subject never, but from the pictorial charm only--the
scheme and symphony of the colour, the satisfying beauty of the design:
so that the ultimate expression of our artistic movement in painting has
been, not in the spiritual visions of the pre-Raphaelites, for all their
marvel of Greek legend and their mystery of Italian song, but in the
work of such men as Whistler and Albert Moore, who have raised design
and colour to the ideal level of poetry and music. For the quality of
their exquisite painting comes from the mere inventive and creative
handling of lime and colour, from a certain form and choice of beautiful
workmanship, which, rejecting all literary reminiscence and all
metaphysical idea, is in itself entirely satisfying to the æsthetic
sense--is, as the Greeks would say, an end in itself; the effect of
their work being like the effect given to us by music; for music is the
art in which form and matter are always one--the art whose subject
cannot be separated from the method of its expression; the art which
most completely realises for us the artistic ideal, and is the condition
to which all the other arts are constantly aspiring.
Now, this increased sense of the absolutely satisfying value of
beautiful workmanship, this recognition of the primary importance of the
sensuous element in art, this love of art for art's sake, is the point
in which we of the younger school have made a departure from the
teaching of Mr. Ruskin,--a departure definite and different and
decisive.
Master indeed of the knowledge of all noble living and of the wisdom of
all spiritual things will he be to us ever, seeing that it was he who by
the magic of his presence and the music of his lips taught us at Oxford
that enthusiasm for beauty which is the secret of Hellenism, and that
desire for creation which is the secret of life, and filled some of us,
at least, with the lofty and passionate ambition to go forth into far
and fair lands with some message for the nations and some mission for
the world, and yet in his art criticism, his estimate of the joyous
element of art, his whole method of approaching art, we are no longer
with him; for the keystone to his æsthetic system is ethical always. He
would judge of a picture by the amount of noble moral ideas it
expresses; but to us the channels by which all noble work in painting
can touch, and does touch, the soul are not those of truths of life or
metaphysical truths. To him perfection of workmanship seems but the
symbol of pride, and incompleteness of technical resource the image of
an imagination too limitless to find within the limits of form its
complete expression, or of a love too simple not to stammer in its tale.
But to us the rule of art is not the rule of morals. In an ethical
system, indeed, of any gentle mercy good intentions will, one is fain to
fancy, have their recognition; but of those that would enter the serene
House of Beauty the question that we ask is not what they had ever
meant to do, but what they have done. Their pathetic intentions are of
no value to us, but their realised creations only. _Pour moi je préfère
les poètes qui font des vers, les médecins qui sachent guérir, les
peintres qui sachent peindre._
Nor, in looking at a work of art, should we be dreaming of what it
symbolises, but rather loving it for what it is. Indeed, the
transcendental spirit is alien to the spirit of art. The metaphysical
mind of Asia may create for itself the monstrous and many-breasted idol,
but to the Greek, pure artist, that work is most instinct with spiritual
life which conforms most closely to the perfect facts of physical life
also. Nor, in its primary aspect, has a painting, for instance, any more
spiritual message or meaning for us than a blue tile from the wall of
Damascus, or a Hitzen vase. It is a beautifully-coloured surface,
nothing more, and affects us by no suggestion stolen from philosophy, no
pathos pilfered from literature, no feeling filched from a poet, but by
its own incommunicable artistic essence--by that selection of truth
which we call style, and that relation of values which is the
draughtsmanship of painting, by the whole quality of the workmanship,
the arabesque of the design, the splendour of the colour, for these
things are enough to stir the most divine and remote of the chords which
make music in our soul, and colour, indeed, is of itself a mystical
presence on things, and tone a kind of sentiment.
This, then--the new departure of our younger school--is the chief
characteristic of Mr. Rennell Rodd's poetry; for, while there is much in
his work that may interest the intellect, much that will excite the
emotions, and many cadenced chords of sweet and simple sentiment--for to
those who love Art for its own sake all other things are added--yet the
effect which they preëminently seek to produce is purely an artistic
one. Such a poem as "The Sea-King's Grave," with all its majesty of
melody as sonorous and as strong as the sea by whose pine-fringed
shores it was thus nobly conceived and nobly fashioned; or the little
poem that follows it, whose cunning workmanship, wrought with such an
artistic sense of limitation, one might liken to the rare chasing of the
mirror that is its motive; or "In a Church," pale flower of one of those
exquisite moments when all things except the moment itself seem so
curiously real, and when the old memories of forgotten days are touched
and made tender, and the familiar place grows fervent and solemn
suddenly with a vision of the undying beauty of the gods that died; or
the scene in "Chartres Cathedral," sombre silence brooding on vault and
arch, silent people kneeling on the dust of the desolate pavement as the
young priest lifts Lord Christ's body in a crystal star, and then the
sudden beams of scarlet light that break through the blazoned window and
smite on the carven screen, and sudden organ peals of mighty music
rolling and echoing from choir to canopy, and from spire to shaft, and
over all the clear glad voice of a singing boy, affecting one as a
thing oversweet, and striking just the right artistic keynote for one's
emotions; or "At Lanuvium", through the music of whose lines one seems
to hear again the murmur of the Mantuan bees straying down from their
own green valleys and inland streams to find what honeyed amber the
sea-flowers might be hiding; or the poem written "In the Coliseum,"
which gives one the same artistic joy that one gets watching a
handicraftsman at his work, a goldsmith hammering out his gold into
those thin plates as delicate as the petals of a yellow rose, or drawing
it out into the long wires like tangled sunbeams, so perfect and
precious is the mere handling of it; or the little lyric interludes that
break in here and there like the singing of a thrush, and are as swift
and as sure as the beating of a bird's wing, as light and bright as the
apple-blossoms that flutter fitfully down to the orchard grass after a
spring shower, and look the lovelier for the rain's tears lying on
their dainty veinings of pink and pearl; or the sonnets--for Mr. Rodd
is one of those _qui sonnent le sonnet_, as the Ronsardists used to
say--that one called "On the Border Hills," with its fiery wonder of
imagination and the strange beauty of its eighth line; or the one which
tells of the sorrow of the great king for the little dead child,--well,
all these poems aim, as I said, at producing a purely artistic effect,
and have the rare and exquisite quality that belongs to work of that
kind; and I feel that the entire subordination in our æsthetic movement
of all merely emotional and intellectual motives to the vital informing
poetic principle is the surest sign of our strength.
But it is not enough that a work of art should conform to the æsthetic
demands of the age: there should be also about it, if it is to give us
any permanent delight, the impress of a distinct individuality. Whatever
work we have in the nineteenth century must rest on the two poles of
personality and perfection. And so in this little volume, by separating
the earlier and more simple work from the work that is later and
stronger and possesses increased technical power and more artistic
vision, one might weave these disconnected poems, these stray and
scattered threads, into one fiery-coloured strand of life, noting first
a boy's mere gladness of being young, with all its simple joy in field
and flower, in sunlight and in song, and then the bitterness of sudden
sorrow at the ending by Death of one of the brief and beautiful
friendships of one's youth, with all those unanswered longings and
questionings unsatisfied by which we vex, so uselessly, the marble face
of death; the artistic contrast between the discontented incompleteness
of the spirit and the complete perfection of the style that expresses it
forming the chief element of the æsthetic charm of these particular
poems;--and then the birth of Love, and all the wonder and the fear and
the perilous delight of one on whose boyish brows the little wings of
love have beaten for the first time; and the love-songs, so dainty and
delicate, little swallow-flights of music, and full of such fragrance
and freedom that they might all be sung in the open air and across
moving water; and then autumn, coming with its quireless woods and
odorous decay and ruined loveliness, Love lying dead; and the sense of
the mere pity of it.
One might stop there, for from a young poet one should ask for no deeper
chords of life than those that love and friendship make eternal for us;
and the best poems in this volume belong clearly to a later time, a time
when these real experiences become absorbed and gathered up into a form
which seems from such real experiences to be the most alien and the most
remote; when the simple expression of joy or sorrow suffices no longer,
and lives rather in the stateliness of the cadenced metre, in the music
and colour of the linked words, than in any direct utterance; lives, one
might say, in the perfection of the form more than in the pathos of the
feeling. And yet, after the broken music of love and the burial of love
in the autumn woods, we can trace that wandering among strange people,
and in lands unknown to us, by which we try so pathetically to heal the
hurts of the life we know, and that pure and passionate devotion to Art
which one gets when the harsh reality of life has too suddenly wounded
one, and is with discontent or sorrow marring one's youth, just as
often, I think, as one gets it from any natural joy of living; and that
curious intensity of vision by which, in moments of over-mastering
sadness and despair ungovernable, artistic things will live in one's
memory with a vivid realism caught from the life which they help one to
forget--an old gray tomb in Flanders with a strange legend on it, making
one think how, perhaps, passion does live on after death, a necklace of
blue and amber beads and a broken mirror found in a girl's grave at
Rome, a marble image of a boy habited like Erôs, and with the pathetic
tradition of a great king's sorrow lingering about it like a purple
shadow,--over all these the tired spirit broods with that calm and
certain joy that one gets when one has found something that the ages
never dull and the world cannot harm; and with it comes that desire of
Greek things which is often an artistic method of expressing one's
desire for perfection; and that longing for the old dead days which is
so modern, so incomplete, so touching, being, in a way, the inverted
torch of Hope, which burns the hand it should guide; and for many things
a little sadness, and for all things a great love; and lastly, in the
pine-wood by the sea, once more the quick and vital pulse of joyous
youth leaping and laughing in every line, the frank and fearless freedom
of wave and wind waking into fire life's burnt-out ashes and into song
the silent lips of pain,--how clearly one seems to see it all, the long
colonnade of pines with sea and sky peeping in here and there like a
flitting of silver; the open place in the green deep heart of the wood
with the little moss-grown altar to the old Italian god in it; and the
flowers all about, cyclamen in the shadowy places, and the stars of the
white narcissus lying like snowflakes over the grass, where the quick,
bright-eyed lizard starts by the stone, and the snake lies coiled lazily
in the sun on the hot sand, and overhead the gossamer floats from the
branches like thin tremulous threads of gold,--the scene is so perfect
for its motive, for surely here, if anywhere, the real gladness of life
might be revealed to one's youth--the gladness that comes, not from the
rejection, but from the absorption, of all passion, and is like that
serene calm that dwells in the faces of the Greek statues, and which
despair and sorrow cannot disturb, but intensify only.
In some such way as this we could gather up these strewn and scattered
petals of song into one perfect rose of life, and yet, perhaps, in so
doing, we might be missing the true quality of the poems; one's real
life is so often the life that one does not lead; and beautiful poems,
like threads of beautiful silks, may be woven into many patterns and to
suit many designs, all wonderful and all different: and romantic poetry,
too, is essentially the poetry of impressions, being like that latest
school of painting, the school of Whistler and Albert Moore, in its
choice of situation as opposed to subject; in its dealing with the
exceptions rather than with the types of life; in its brief intensity;
in what one might call its fiery-coloured momentariness, it being indeed
the momentary situations of life, the momentary aspects of nature, which
poetry and painting now seek to render for us. Sincerity and constancy
will the artist, indeed, have always; but sincerity in art is merely
that plastic perfection of execution without which a poem or a painting,
however noble its sentiment or human its origin, is but wasted and
unreal work, and the constancy of the artist cannot be to any definite
rule or system of living, but to that principle of beauty only through
which the inconstant shadows of his life are in their most fleeting
moment arrested and made permanent. He will not, for instance, in
intellectual matters, acquiesce in that facile orthodoxy of our day
which is so reasonable and so artistically uninteresting, nor yet will
he desire that fiery faith of the antique time which, while it
intensified, yet limited, the vision, still less will he allow the calm
of his culture to be marred by the discordant despair of doubt or the
sadness of a sterile skepticism; for the Valley Perilous, where ignorant
armies clash by night, is no resting-place meet for her to whom the gods
have assigned the clear upland, the serene height, and the sunlit
air,--rather will he be always curiously testing new forms of belief,
tinging his nature with the sentiment that still lingers about some
beautiful creeds, and searching for experience itself, and not for the
fruits of experience, when he has got its secret, he will leave without
regret much that was once very precious to him. "I am always insincere,"
says Emerson somewhere, "as knowing that there are other moods:" "_Les
émotions_," wrote Théophile Gautier once in a review of Arsène
Houssaye, "_Les émotions ne se ressemblent pas, mais être ému--voilà
l'important_".
Now, this is the secret of the art of the modern romantic school, and
gives one the right keynote for its apprehension; but the real quality
of all work which, like Mr. Rodd's, aims, as I said, at a purely
artistic effect, cannot be described in terms of intellectual criticism;
it is too intangible for that. One can perhaps convey it best in terms
of the other arts, and by reference to them; and, indeed, some of these
poems are as iridescent and as exquisite as a lovely fragment of
Venetian glass; others as delicate in perfect workmanship and as simple
in natural motive as an etching by Whistler is, or one of those
beautiful little Greek figures which in the olive woods round Tanagra
men can still find, with the faint gilding and the fading crimson not
yet fled from hair and lips and raiment; and many of them seem like one
of Corot's twilights just passing into music, for not merely in visible
colour, but in sentiment also--which is the colour of poetry--may there
be a kind of tone.
But I think that the best likeness to the quality of this young poet's
work I ever saw was in the landscape by the Loire. We were staying once,
he and I, at Amboise, that little village with its gray-slate roofs and
steep streets and gaunt grim gateway, where the quiet cottages nestle
like white pigeons into the sombre clefts of the great bastioned rock,
and the stately Renaissance houses stand silent and apart--very desolate
now, but with some memory of the old days still lingering about the
delicately-twisted pillars, and the carved doorways, with their
grotesque animals, and laughing masks, and quaint heraldic devices, all
reminding one of a people who could not think life real till they had
made it fantastic. And above the village, and beyond the bend of the
river, we used to go in the afternoon, and sketch from one of the big
barges that bring the wine in autumn and the wood in winter down to the
sea, or lie in the long grass and make plans _pour la gloire, et pour
ennuyer les philistins_, or wander along the low sedgy banks, "matching
our reeds in sportive rivalry," as comrades used in the old Sicilian
days; and the land was an ordinary land enough, and bare too when one
thought of Italy, and how the oleanders were robing the hillsides by
Genoa in scarlet, and the cyclamen filling with its purple every valley
from Florence to Rome; for there was not much real beauty, perhaps, in
it, only long white dusty roads, and straight rows of formal poplars;
but now and then some little breaking gleam of broken light would lend
to the gray field and the silent barn a secret and a mystery that were
hardly their own, would transfigure for one exquisite moment the
peasants passing down through the vineyard, or the shepherd watching on
the hill, would tip the willows with silver, and touch the river into
gold; and the wonder of the effect, with the strange simplicity of the
material, always seemed to me to be a little like the quality of these
the verses of my friend.